“He informed me that he wished to marry you.”
The girl’s eyes sank in shamed confusion.
“I—said I could not promise until—unless——” she faltered.
He arose, gripping his chair-back with tense fingers.
“It will be impossible to learn the ultimate intentions of my client at present,” he said.
He continued to look at her as she sat in the soft radiance of the lamp-light, her head bowed, her slender hands, browned and roughened by the labors of sorrowful years, tightly clasped in her lap; and a great compassion for her friendless youth, her woman’s tenderness and weakness, swept over him like a flood. He longed to take her in his arms, to comfort her unforgotten griefs and forever to shield her from the coldness of an unfriendly world. She seemed so slight, so fragile a creature in her thin dress of faded muslin, with the heavy masses of her hair knotted low against her slender neck.
“You say you cannot tell me who it is?” she murmured. “It is so strange not to know—to wait, being afraid every day. Why, any time Jimmy might come home and find me gone.”
Her voice trembled into silence.
He bent toward her, his face transfigured with love and pity.